I’m fond of
saying that the most radical claim we make as people of faith—and by this, I
mean all monotheists, not just Christians—is that the God who created
everything is God who actually does stuff. None of this deistic,
set-the-world-spinning-and-walk-away belief for us! The more deeply you immerse
yourself in the life of a worshiping congregation, hopefully, the more you
find this to ring true in your life

—the easier it is to see evidence of God at work in you.

Meanwhile,
many who claim to be believers will settle for a vague belief that “something
created all this.” That is profound and wonderful, and it’s a very good start.
But that’s not all we’re about here. In the church, we understand God to make
promises and then to follow through.

all art by Gertrud Mueller Nelson

For
thousands of years, we have believed this. We are the descendants of those who
believe that God makes and keeps promises. Today’s readings are about God keeping
promises. But though God promises to Abraham a land to call home and
descendants to populate it, Abraham catches only a glimpse of it during his
lifetime. We may wonder, “What was the point, then? Can’t God promise and
deliver something that is more immediately satisfying? And if the promise is
going to take so many generations to come, can’t we call into question our own
understanding of what has been promised?”

Well, yes,
we can. And while we may choose to assert that God doesn’t change over time—something
I don’t think we can be sure about, by the way—we can certainly observe that
our understanding of God continues to change and to deepen. This very fact can
be very difficult for people to accept. In a world so given to uncertainty and
tragedy, we want something certain and understandable to hang our beliefs on.
How can we keep our belief in God steady if people’s beliefs about God keep
changing?

Yet I
wouldn’t want to go back. I wouldn’t want to live in a time before the
scientific method, because the scientific method shows us how God actually does
stuff in ways we can apprehend and measure. I wouldn’t want to live in a time when
we settled for existing in separate tribes that were all terrified of each
other—something we still have in many places in the world today, though perhaps now we can begin to see beyond it! I wouldn’t
want to go back to a time when we assumed that men and women were relegated to
specific roles in society, and when we assumed that God wanted it this way. I
look forward to more freedom in the world, and also for people to gain a
greater sense of our responsibility to each other. Jesus commanded us to “love
one another,” and we still have so much work to do as we learn how to love. I
pray that God will continue to show us how all the new things we learn from
each other are actually a part of God’s long-range plans.

Now, about
the gospel passage: I would be remiss if I didn’t clarify that the situation in
it is not quite as portrayed. This is not actually a showdown between Jesus and
“the Jews.” Jesus, obviously, was a Jew, as were all of his earliest followers.
When we hear, in John’s gospel, the phrase “the Jews,” we need to imagine
ourselves standing with them. Jesus is talking to us—not to members of some
other religion, but people who share his own faith.

In today’s
gospel passage, those who are challenging Jesus—the Jews, or rather, those of
us who share Jesus’ faith—revisit the promise to Abraham. This turns into a
teaching moment, and Jesus folds time back on itself to announce that Abraham
saw Jesus coming and was glad. Here we have a key piece of Christology—Jesus
claiming that he existed before Abraham. Yet it’s deeper than that. He doesn’t
say, “Before Abraham was, I was.” He says, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” The verb
tense transcends our ability to pin Jesus down to a specific timeline. Not only
this, but Jesus also references the very name of God given to Moses in the
wilderness: “I AM.” Centuries later, the theologian Arius insisted that Jesus
was the first of God’s creations and was not to be equated precisely with God.
No doubt Arius’s opponents quoted this piece of scripture in their quest to
condemn Arius as a heretic.

So what do
you think of all this? Better yet, what do you feel about all this? Did Abraham
experience Jesus from two thousand years away? Have you experienced Jesus in
your own life, two thousand years removed on the other side? If we can, perhaps
Abraham did, too, even if he never imagined the name Jesus.

This is the
project of religion: not just to cogitate and to wonder, but to experience a
transcendent reality. If God is all in our heads, God might be a figment of our
imaginations. But when we get out of our heads and down into our hearts, we
find Jesus there waiting for us. He smiles and says, “I’ve been here all along.
Welcome.” We find that, in him, we are home. He sets a table for us, and the
table is called Wisdom. In preparing a home for us, he is our host, and when we
invite him into our new home, we find that he is also the guest. But better
yet, we don’t even have to provide for our guest, because Jesus is also the
meal. Jesus is host, guest, and meal, and he invites us to relax into his
hospitality. Jesus
promises us a home, just as God promised Abraham a home—not an immediate place
to lay our heads, but a legacy for the future and also an image of being taken
care of that transcends every timeline.

We are deep into Lent. Next week we
will revisit the events in the final week of Jesus’ earthly life. It will be
almost like we are there ourselves. Don’t just think about it. Experience it.
Settle into the mystery in which Jesus suffers for us and then goes ahead of us
into death to prepare a home for us. Like Abraham, we can see that home from
afar, and this will allow us to fall deeply in love with God all over again.
Amen.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

I can’t help but think that much of what happens in Jesus’ exchange
with the woman at the well is not abundantly clear in print. Words by themselves
cannot possibly tell an entire story, so the words of the Bible serve as a
script for performance. And so when we read the Bible we cannot avoid putting
ourselves into it. This story is a great example, and if I take this story in a
direction that doesn’t work for you, I invite you yourself to read the story
out loud sometime and see what you come up with. It might be something very
different.

Map (8th century BCE) from Wikipedia

Jesus and his disciples are passing through foreign territory. And
here’s where a little history will be helpful. A thousand years before Jesus,
the original, short-lived nation of Israel suffered a political split. Samaria
became the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, while Jerusalem, the
“city of David,” remained the capital of the southern kingdom of Judah.
Naturally, Jerusalem not being a part of the northern kingdom, David’s city did
not remain important to the northern people of Israel, so they moved the focus
of their worship to Mount Gerizim. Israel in the north was eventually conquered
by the Assyrians. One hundred fifty years later the southern kingdom of Judah
was conquered by a newer superpower, the Babylonians.

Many of the northern Jews intermarried with Assyrians but retained
their Jewish faith and practice as best they could. They became known as the
Samaritans, and they are still around to this day, though only a few hundred
remain. In Jesus’ time, Samaria was yet another occupied province of the Roman
Empire. Despite the Samaritans and the Judean Jews being under the same
occupation, the ancient rivalries about the proper place of worship had not
abated. The other big difference is that the northern tribes never received any
formal permission to repopulate their homeland in their own way, while the
Judeans had been given express permission several centuries before, by King
Cyrus of Persia, to reclaim their land and their worship practices and to
rebuild their temple.

And so we have two peoples with common ancestors, nursing grudges
and suffering from a great deal of animosity towards each other—like Catholics
and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or like Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq.
The excuse for the breach is religious, but mostly it plays out in politics and
especially in social norms. No doubt the children on both sides are told simply
that if you want to remain safe and untainted, you stay away from “those
people.”

unknown African artist;image from beggarsbread,org

At a well in Samaria, Jesus throws this systemic racism out the window.
I imagine the woman is startled to see a Jew at the well. Jesus is “tired out
by his journey” and thirsty, and he has no bucket with which to get water. He
uses his physical needs to make himself vulnerable, but this vulnerability is
not immediately apparent. Jesus’ opening line to the woman is, “Give me a
drink.”

I’ve heard this story many times, but this is the first time it has
occurred to me that this is a pick-up line—in reverse! It’s the opposite of, “Let
me buy you a drink.” It’s also historically related to ancient stories of men
and women and wells—stories their two religions share. Abraham’s servant met
Isaac’s future wife Rebecca at a well, and he asked her for a drink. Jacob met Rachel, the love of his life, when
she came to the well and he helped her remove the heavy cover from it. Moses met
his wife Zipporah at a well. It’s a trope of ancient Semitic storytelling, as
familiar to them as “a man walks into a bar.” When I was at seminary, the water
cooler in one of our common areas had a sign next to it that read: “Ladies,
beware of meeting men at the well.”

The woman points out the impropriety of a Jew talking to an
unrelated woman at all, let alone a Samaritan woman. And this is when things
get interesting. Jesus says, “If you had any idea who I am, you’d be asking me
for a drink of living water.” Now, living water is not just an obscure mystical
metaphor. Living water can also mean running water—flowing water—something
you’ll never find in a well.

But there’s also the possibility of some innuendo here—like, “I’m
not just any man. You don’t know what you’re missing.” So it should come as no
surprise that the woman replies, in essence, “This well is deep, buddy, and you
have no way into it. How great a man do you think you are?” She dares him to
compare himself to Jacob, the great common ancestor of Jews and Samaritans. Referring
to Jacob may also be an attempt to transcend their differences. Is she picking
up on Jesus’ advances? Is she rationalizing the possibilities that might emerge
with this foreigner? What is going on inside her?

Jesus keeps up the banter: “Lady, I’ll give you water that will
quench your thirst so much you’ll never be thirsty again—and it will lead to
eternal life.”

“Hah!” she retorts. “You do think you’re good!” A pause. “It
would be great never to have to come here to draw water again.” And so the
woman drops her guard by letting on that this public place stokes her public
shame. She waits until noon to draw water, in the heat of the day, long after
the other women have gone. She may speak this line with sarcasm, but is it also
full of longing? Jesus knows it. The woman is thirsty for human connection
without judgment. She wants to be known and loved for who she really is, but
there is so much stuff in the way!

So Jesus calls out the stuff. He acts as if he has suddenly remembered
that he shouldn’t be seen talking to a woman. “Go, call your husband, and come
back.”

The woman’s story is not private; among her people, everybody knows
about it. But it is, for her and for her people, shameful. If she is such a
difficult wife that five men have rejected and divorced her, society scorns her
willfulness. On the other hand, if she has outlived five husbands, would you want
to marry her? She must have sinned in some way to earn this curse, so she is to
be feared and shunned. The fact that this foreigner already knows her story is a
little bit strange, though. Thus her reply: “Sir, I see that you are a prophet!”
She may say it sarcastically, but … how does he know?

Now the woman shifts the conversation. Perhaps she’s never met a
Jew before; she has only grown up hearing about their unforgivable flaws. Now
she finally has a chance to understand one first hand, while nobody else is
looking. And she is beginning to trust that he is, indeed, not like other men. So
she starts talking theology: “OK, So the main difference between Samaritans and
Jews is the place where we worship God. You say it has to be in Jerusalem,
while we worship here. Just how different are we? What do you say?”

In reply, Jesus first claims that Jews are more theologically
correct than Samaritans; perhaps there’s still an element of their banter. But he
also states unequivocally that a unifying force will come out of Judaism and
reunite the two clans. He says that very soon the mark of true worship will not
depend on location or ancestral homeland, for anybody. Everyone will be invited
just to love God.

“Yes,” says the woman. “Our two sects agree that our savior is
coming.”

“Indeed,” says Jesus. “And you are speaking with him right now.”

The sexually charged banter has given way to true affection, the
sarcasm to earnestness, and the woman feels herself being transformed. Over the
next two days, she will serve as a magnet to draw many of her fellow Samaritans
to this man’s presence.

What attractive reason does she give for meeting Jesus? “Come see a
man who told me everything I have ever done!” On the surface, it may sound like
she’s shilling for a fortune teller. So we must presume that the rest of the
message comes in her face, in her bearing, in her total transformation before
the town’s eyes, in the fact that her fear and shame have evaporated completely.

This is why Jesus is able to explain to his disciples, “Look! The
field is ripe for harvesting all around you.” It’s true for us, too. We don’t
have to look far to find someone who needs a human connection with God. Just go
out of your way to seek out the people who are invisible, or who have been made
invisible. There we will find the thirsty ones who crave the living water of a
connection with God. There the church will, as Chris Hoke preached a few weeks
ago, “storm the gates of Hades.”

Brené Brown, social scientist, professor, writer, Episcopalian,
says that the message the church needs to send is not, “Show up, act like us,
be seen.” Rather, our message should be simply, “Show up, be seen.” And then we
need to do whatever it takes to act out the truth of that message. This is what
frees people to move from shame to safety and hope.

When the other Samaritans come to Jesus, they find that the woman’s
words are true, but they also find that they are able to understand the words
in a new way through direct experience. It’s true in our world, too. You can
study Christianity all you want academically and never make a spiritual connection
with it. Faith can only be properly explored and understood experientially—from
the inside. The further in you go, the larger it becomes.

Furthermore, our solitude holds no answer to our loneliness.
Faith—the kind of faith that sustains us for the long haul—comes from within
community. Most especially, it comes in the shift from shunned isolation to
true belonging. And that’s why those who have been marginalized and cast out
are the ones who understand Jesus best of all. Jesus restores them to their
communities. It’s like they are born again.

God had to become one of us in order for us to relate to God at
all. You can’t have a human connection with an all-transcendent deity. Yet
human connection is what we need and are made for, so God saw fit to give that
to us. The Savior of the world is God among us, God who knows us more deeply
than we know ourselves. Even today he brings us living water and says, “You are
my beloved—no matter what.” Amen.